Hello! If you’re reading this in public right now, there’s a decent chance someone nearby is also reading it over your shoulder. Hi, random onlooker. We see you. 👋🏻 This week in The New Thing: screen snoopers and the tech designed to stop them. Plus, the pope weighs in on AI, Spotify’s new narrator era, how to instantly turn off Instagram Instants and the Ferrari EV laughs heard round the world.
I’m typing this on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 with a feature I wish every laptop had.
Looking at the screen straight on, it seems like your everyday 14-inch display. But if you were sitting next to me at this coffee shop or in a cramped coach seat, you wouldn’t be able to see much. It’s like one of those stick-on privacy shields, except built right into the laptop’s display. No plastic sheet to snap on and off. No weird gaps between screen and protector. No “why does my $2,000 laptop look like it’s wearing a pair of discount transition lenses?”
If you follow tech news closely, you also know this sort of technology is already coming to phones. The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has a Privacy display. Enable it in settings and the screen becomes harder to see from an angle. I love it. I wish my iPhone 17 Pro had it. Sadly, it doesn’t so I now have a plastic privacy protector covering my screen.
Why? Because it’s become a lot easier for regular people to become screen snoopers. Visual hackers. Shoulder surfers. Whatever you want to call them, the idea is simple: Why hack into a phone or laptop when I can just look at it from across the room—or the plane aisle—and collect information? And with a smartphone camera zoom, everyday onlookers have reasonably effective spy tools.
This isn’t paranoia. I started looking into this because I kept hearing stories. On an airplane recently, a source of mine spotted a competitor’s slide deck from a well-known media company, snapped photos and sent them around. At a well-known big tech company, employees share things in Slack that they’ve learned by looking at other people’s screens on flights in and out of SFO.
So what’s the solution? Use protection. Here are a few ideas:
Today’s newsletter was written and curated by Joanna Stern and Adele Lowitz. See you Friday!
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